Negative (4), 2007, oil on canvas, 55 x 55 cm

In the Negatives series pain­ting talent is mixed with automatism. The result is com­positions of pul­sing, “Fan­goresque” circ­les, freely scat­tered about the canvas and over­lap­ping. The com­position and color com­binations required talent. The use of a compass with the brush ensured per­fect circ­les. In times past, when art did not require tiresome ideas, we might have “disposed” with the pic­ture after sharing these pleasant impres­sions of the per­fec­tion of the shapes and the chan­ging colors. We, however, are interested in artists who “plague” reality. In this case the title is a painful tactic. A negative is an image that becomes a true pic­ture only when what is dark becomes light, and what is red, green, or blue trans­forms into a complementary color. Anyone who has developed film in a darkroom has trained his imagination, and can easily imagine an image based on a black-and-white negative. The imagination puts up significan­tly greater resistance to negative colors. Treating a color abs­tract image as a negative and seeing it as a reversed positive almost utterly trans­cends the capability of our imagination. This pic­ture stub­bornly seeks to be what it is, and refuses to forego its “negativity.”

Maria Anna Potocka, museum direc­tor and writer 

Negative (1), 2007, oil on canvas, 62 x 62 cm

Negative (3), 2007, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm